The Internet has experienced explosive growth in recent years. The emergence of the World Wide Web has enabled millions of users around the world to download easily web pages containing text, graphics, video, and sound data while at home, work, or from remote locations via wireless devices. These web pages often are large in size and therefore require a long time to download, causing the user delay and frustration. Delay often causes users to abandon the requested web page and move on to another web page, resulting in lost revenue and exposure for many commercial web sites.
Delay downloading a web page can be caused by a number of factors. For example, at the server, a large volume of page requests may overload the capacity of the server and result in unanswered or late-answered requests. One specific factor in delay at the server is caused by the server program inefficiently reading and writing data to and from network sockets. Another factor in delay is that management of a large number of connections by a web server can slow down the server, because the connections must be polled to determine whether any activity has occurred on the connections. This consumes valuable processor time, slowing down the rate at which the server may respond to requests. A third factor in delay is that server socket queues may become congested with requests that are computationally intensive, such as downloading a large image, thus slowing down smaller requests queued up behind these computationally intensive requests.
These factors and many others combine to delay current web server response time, frustrating users with long wait times for downloading web pages. Thus, a need exists for systems, methods, and devices that decrease web server delay, to create a more pleasurable web browsing experience.